Watson Family University Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs John Eason has been named the William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law for the 2024-25 academic year, effective September 1.
While at the American Bar Foundation, Eason will work on crafting a new narrative on prison abolition while writing articles, chapters, and public pieces to complete a book tentatively titled Bringing Down the Big House: From the Invisible Land to the Upcycled Place. In addition to managing quantitative analysis on the impact of prison closures by Undergraduate Research Scholars through the Justice Policy Lab at Brown University, he will be conducting field work across two rural communities in California that are losing or have lost their prison. These two data sources will be complemented by delving into archives throughout Chicago to map his family’s history onto shifts across the criminal legal system.